Background

Goa Central Library, located in the State of Goa, West of India, is the oldest library in the country. Since the Library opened its door in 1832, the facility has maintained a collection of nearly 200,000 books in Goa’s official language of Konkani, as well as many other languages. The book section carries Goan newspapers dating back 130 years as well as a collection of literature printed in Goa of the 17th century. The Library also houses a number of rare collections documenting Goa’s past as a Portuguese colony and other items of historical importance.

Challenges

While the Library owns many valuable items, its most recurrent security issue has been visitors thoughtlessly tearing pages out of books or otherwise damaging them. Lost and stolen books, disturbances resulting from loud conversation, and theft of stationery were other problems that administrators hoped an effective monitoring regime could help alleviate.

Solutions

Goa Library’s facilities encompass a wide variety of environments – from dimly lit stacks with long narrow aisles to brightly illuminated reading rooms with broad unbroken spaces – posing a challenge for system integrators aiming to provide a robust surveillance solution while keeping administration simple. Ultimately, Reconnoitre Systems, in association with AUTOCOP, developed a solution adopting a total of 116 pieces of VIVOTEK cameras – 78 pieces of FD7131s, 30 pieces of SD8121s and eight SD7323 units, in addition to VIVOTEK in-house ST7501 software.

Benefits

VIVOTEK FD7131 is a fixed dome network camera designed for indoor surveillance. Its wide-angle vari-focus lens provides maximum coverage, while a sophisticated three-axis mechanical design enables simple, flexible installations on either a ceiling or a wall. The FD7131 fields not only a rich feature set but also advanced technologies like a passive infrared sensor for motion detection and built-in white-light illuminators for situations where light levels are low. The FD7131 can even transmit dual streams of video at different resolutions, allowing simultaneous real-time viewing on separate devices—for example, on an on-site administrator’s PC and on a mobile phone, thanks to 3GPP support. VIVOTEK SD8121 speed dome network cameras, which are now in use at the Library, is like an icing on a cake to FD7131’s baseline of features by adding powerful 12x optical zoom, enabling administrators to obtain sharp details even at considerable distances. With sophisticated remote pan/tilt capabilities, the camera offers a full 360° pan and 90° tilt, controllable via a mouse or joystick, with up to 128 preset positions available for patrolling setups. Moreover, the SD8121 generates excellent image quality even in challenging lighting conditions, thanks to its Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) technology. When a camera attempts to capture footage in a high-contrast, backlight, glare or light-reflective environment, subjects may be unrecognizable. WDR compensates for the unbalanced lighting, restoring the details throughout the field of view. Furthermore, an automatically controlled built-in IR-cut filter and IR illumination allow the SD8121 to adapt to changing levels of light without intervention from an operator. VIVOTEK SD7323E is another high-performance speed dome network camera with a 35x zoom lens. In addition to going beyond the SD8121’s ability to obtain crisply detailed images from afar, the SD7323 features ground-breaking technology such as electronic image stabilization to mitigate the effect of vibration and other camera movement, and a 3D privacy mask that allows the Library to prevent designated areas in the field of view from being filmed, even when the remote PTZ functionality is used to pan, tilt or zoom the camera.

Customer’s feedback

After deployment of the Library‘s new surveillance was completed in June 2011 came the real test: how would it perform in actual use? Fortunately, the system has not only met the Library‘s requirements, but surpassed expectations, bringing benefits like greater convenience to the staff, ability to monitor more of the Library‘s indoor environment than ever before, and excellent image quality far surpassing what Library had anticipated. According to VIVOTEK‘s valued partners, Reconnoitre Systems and AUTOCOP, the installation has helped the Library resolve security issues, calling VIVOTEK hardware and software "a great investment". The Curator of the State Central Library Goa is the Head of State Central Library and it is under the administrative control of Government of Goa, Directorate of Education.